Professor Rebecca Landell studied classical cello under Professor of Cello Darrett Adkins, OC ’91, and baroque cello and viola da gamba under former Associate Professor of Baroque Cello and Viola da Gamba Catharina Meints before completing her master’s degree under Herbert S. Autrey Professor of Cello Norman Fischer, OC ’71, at Rice University. She has incorporated acting and education into her studies, later moving to the Netherlands to work with Steuart Pincombe, OC ’09, to create innovative programs in unusual performance spaces. Landell has received numerous accolades throughout her career, such as performing on the 2019 Grammy award-winning recording Songs of Orpheus by Apollo’s Fire and being cited as a notable performer in The New York Times’ 2016 review of a Manhattan Apollo’s Fire performance. At Oberlin, she currently offers lessons in Cello, Viola da Gamba, and Baroque Cello, in addition to teaching Baroque Ensemble.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What was it like spending notable parts of your career working with Oberlin alumni across the world?

It’s been really fun. It’s kind of like meeting your family around the world, and you also get to see how Oberlin students bloom. One of the things that I really like about this school is that there are these wonderful tastes that you can have of jazz, improv, small ensemble, large ensemble, leading your own ensemble, contemporary music, early music, all sorts of things. And then, a few years later, you bump into people and see how they’re putting it all together for themselves with their other interests, especially if they were, for example, a biology major and a cellist.

What is it like to be back at your alma mater as a professor, working alongside some of your own former professors?

It’s been a real honor — and also some really big shoes to fill. Catharina Meints, who was my predecessor, was at the forefront of early music coming back into the U.S. as a field. To be able to teach in her position, I definitely feel the legacy. But it’s also been super inspiring and fun to work with professors who were here when I was a student and get to know them a little bit more as colleagues.

How do you navigate teaching lessons on three instruments as well as their ensembles?

   I don’t think about it that much anymore. I love variety in my artistic output, so it’s become such a part of my mindset that I don’t notice as much. I do notice when students are switching themselves and are learning how to switch. I’m reminded, “Oh yeah, I have to talk through how to do this. How do you go from gamba to cello and back again?”

   I think the bigger thing for me is switching periods. I think it’s more that I want to almost put on the glasses from that period so I can be thoughtful about the kind of feedback I’m giving. If you’re expressing pain in French baroque music, you’re going to use a certain set of techniques that are very different from expressing pain in Wagner. One might use long chromaticism over hours and hours in Wagner, and in French baroque music, they might do it through just a small set of ornaments.

It’s more thinking about performance as an art historian: What kind of tools are helpful for the student to know how to unpack this particular point in history? And how were people crafting these emotions?

Now that baroque ensemble is being offered in the large ensemble pool, have you seen more interest in baroque training from Conservatory students?

There’s been a steady increase in interest, but we are just about to change the model for baroque orchestra. Previously, you had to have training in order to get into the baroque orchestra, but this spring, we’re starting a new model where you don’t have to have any experience. Over the five weeks of the baroque orchestra cycle, you’ll actually get beginner training and have a small concert at the end. 

We’ll see what kind of effect that has on interest. I think we just want students to have an experience — even if it’s a singular experience — just so that they’re familiar with some of the concepts and get the feel for the instruments. It really makes a big difference and changes the way you play when you’re holding a period instrument.

Is there an impactful moment from your career in performance and innovation that you have used in your pedagogy?

I think it’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment when it happened, but over the course of my undergrad here, I came in with a bit of a fixed mindset about what I could do as a cellist or what I should sound like or how to express myself, like certain ways you use vibrato and make tone. Over the course of the four years I was here, I gained a much more flexible mindset about how I could craft sounds into time and space to create emotions with all these different techniques. Emotions are universal — everybody feels, in all time, in all countries, what it is to lose something or to feel nostalgia — but how it’s expressed is so unique to each period of history in each location. And I think I came into it with a fixed mindset about what I could create, and I left with a much more flexible mindset. So, that’s my goal as a teacher — to help people on that journey think about themselves as an artist in a little bit more of a flexible way.

Are you working on any projects that you would like to share?

This week, my life is completely overrun with puppets. I’m doing an awesome project with some great artists in the Cleveland area: there’s Ian Petroni, who does the puppets for Parade the Circle in downtown Cleveland; Dave Lucas, Poet Laureate of Ohio, who wrote the libretto; Les Délices, which is the baroque ensemble in Cleveland I play with; and the singer Elena Mullins. We’re doing a show, free for kids, based on Aesop’s fables with historical music, historical instruments, singing, and handmade puppets.